Neil R. Mehrotra

Research Economist

Neil Mehrotra was a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 2016-2017. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Brown University. Neil received his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. His work has appeared in the American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, and has received press coverage from various news outlets, including the Washington Post, New York Times, and Business Insider. His latest research focuses on secular stagnation, falling interest rates, and the implications of low interest rates for monetary policy.

This paper formalizes and quantifies the secular stagnation hypothesis, defined as a persistently low or negative natural rate of interest leading to a chronically binding zero lower bound (ZLB). Output-inflation dynamics and policy prescriptions are fundamentally different from those in the standard New Keynesian framework. Using a 56-period quantitative life cycle model, a standard calibration to US data delivers a natural rate ranging from -1.5% to -2%, implying an elevated risk of ZLB episodes for the foreseeable future. We decompose the contribution of demographic and technological factors to the decline in interest rates since 1970 and quantify changes required to restore higher rates.DOI: https://doi.org/10.21034/wp.742

Drawing from confidential firm-level data of US manufacturing firms, we provide new evidence on the cyclicality of small and large firms. We show that the cyclicality of sales and investment declines with firm size. The effect is primarily driven by differences between the top 0.5% of firms and the rest. Moreover, we show that, due to the skewness of sales and investment, the higher cyclicality of small firms has a negligible influence on the behavior of aggregates. We argue that the size asymmetry is unlikely to be driven by financial frictions given 1) the absence of statistically significant differences in the behavior of production inputs or debt in recessions, 2) the survival of the size effect after directly controlling for proxies of financial strength, and 3) the predictions of a simple financial frictions model, in which unconstrained (large) firms contract more in recessions than constrained (small) firms.DOI: https://doi.org/10.21034/wp.741